Every month for fifteen years, America put a 9/11 equivalent loss of life on the little French colony of Vietnam, after paying the French to do the same for eight years before. (Americans dropped more than twice the tonnage of explosives dropped in all of WW II on tiny Vietnam.)

Vietnamese planes did not bomb three million Americans to death in retaliation. The soft spoken Vietnamese are Buddhists. I once heard one say offhandedly, "Big countries attack small countries," as if it were just the way things are, a fact of life. How can one think of revenge on things the way they are - destiny itself?

Whoever was killed by the bombs Sen. McCain, as a young pilot, released over Hanoi during his twenty-three bombing missions, never had anyone avenge their deaths on McCain. McCain, on the contrary, was saved from drowning in his own parachute by a citizen of the Hanoi he was bombing. The man then protected McCain from residents who wanted to beat him.

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John Kerry, who, before a Congressional committee, called the war an atrocity, is now a millionaire. I wonder if the family of the Vietnamese patriot he shot to death to save his buddies ever received any indemnification.

Eighteen young country girls and one baby shot a point blank range, and one old man who Seal Commander Bob Kerrey had to hold down so his buddy could cut his throat.[1] Their murders were never avenged. Their faces never shown on network news, which did show the faces of American soldiers killed in action, as it still does now.

After the lighting success of the North Korea army, in five weeks uniting the peninsula in, for the first time since the US had divided it and set up a murderous regime in the South,[2] Americans bombed to the ground every Korea city and town of any size, with the exception of US garrisoned Pusan. Divide three thousand (Americans dead at 9/11) into two million (Koreans dead) to estimate how many 9/11s were put on the Korean people. Obviously a flattened Korea could not have gotten back at the superpower even if it would have wanted to, though a hell of a lot of Koreans wanted to, and I'm sure a lot of Koreans still would have liked to have bombed the US back. (To get back at Americans as well for recognizing Korea as territory of Imperial Japan during Korea's brutal forty year Japanese occupation?)

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Panamanians and Dominicans killed by US forces invading and bombing were never avenged. Nor were the hundreds of Cubans killed in the CIA sponsored invasion of their country. Tens of thousands of young people, some teenagers, some pregnant, were made to 'disappear' (hundreds turning up as brutally tortured corpses) by military governments in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti and elsewhere in Latin America, that came to power through CIA action, State Department and Presidential decisions. No sanctions were ever put on the US, once civilian governments were restored. To date there has been no revenge attack from Latin American armed forces, though the same violent foreign policy has continued with the recent kidnapping removal of the priest president of Haiti, financial backing of a coup d'e'tat against popular elected President Chavez of Venezuela in which lives were lost, and using the excuse of drug wars to intervene militarily in various nations.

Iran, Guatemala, and Congo all had their democratically elected governments overthrown by the CIA on Eisenhower's orders, with loss of many lives during the coups, but followed by an even deadlier history of bloodshed that has not abated to this day. There no sign of agents from those countries sneaking into the US to overthrow the American two-party democratic dictatorship, though Eisenhower, on his last day in office, did warn America that the Military-Industrial Complex possibly could.

But an unexpected reaction to coldblooded foreign policy did come about. Arabs, including Osama bin Ladin, brought into Afghanistan to fight the US Cold War, wound up turning on the US(Why?). Some of them willing to blow them selves up, sacrifice their lives, just to attack US embassies, a ship in port etc.(why?). Then came the first attack on the World Trade Towers resulting in a number of fatalities. According to Osama's explanitory statement, it was to avenge the death of a half million Iraqi babies, avenge the violent death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, who had their land taken away by the colonial-powers-dominated UN treacherous and absurd Partition (calculated to bring unending war), and to avenge the stationing of US Armed Forces in desecration of the Islamic Holy Land of Saudi Arabia. [3] When Osama spoke of this as a warning that the West must stop its persecution of Muslin nations[4], some well educated US diplomats must have wondered, as this author did, if this crusade Osama led was also in revenge for decades of the murderous rule, exploitation and denigration of Muslims in all the lands seized from the Turkish Empire by US allies Britain, France and Italy. US conglomerate media made sure that very little of the above mentioned is known by the troops striking designated US enemies in designated places when and where ordered.

When the horrific tragedy of sudden massive destruction and death finally hit American soil on 9/11, many in the anti-imperialist war movement thought, now Americans will appreciate how Vietnamese and Koreans felt, how it feels to be attacked. Young Obama's minister Jeremiah Wright quoted the folk adage, "The chickens have come home to roost," expressing a sense of retribution so many Americans must have been feeling. Commentators on Big Brother TV cartel networks three years later were rebroadcasting it as outrageous treason. The 'correct,' proper and broadcasted reaction to 9/11 was to forget known US crimes against humanity and understand that an evil had attacked what is pure - that evil people were trying to take over the world, as opposed to America, which was said to be always helping world, not trying to take it over (For it already has, one might add). But there was a widespread "Why?" was asked all over an America in shock at the time. While media avoided Osama bin Laden early explanation and call for the West to desist attacking and subverting governments of Muslim nations[5], it highlighted President Bush's infantile remarks on 9/11,"They are jealous of our wealth, hate our freedom - there is evil in the world."

All this gung-ho revenge thrill of American soldiers tattooing '9/11' on their arms and chests? It has nothing to do with reality. The 'Avenge 9/11!' outpour of justified rage is just as corporate media created as all its previous war promotions. 9/11 was indeed indescribably horrendous to behold and remember. Through compassionate news coverage, Americans have quite correctly been made especially aware of this horror spectacle in great detail. But US Media could have covered the thousand times greater horror of US bombing continually in Vietnam, in Korea and other places, but it did not. It could have programed human interest interviews with families of Vietnamese, Korean, Dominican, Lebanese, Panamanian, Grenadian, Cuban survivors. But, instead of compassionate and human interest coverage as was given 9/11, Pentagon-fed media always sought and still seek to minimize the meaning of massive civilian death and maiming produced by Americans, excusing it as being necessary to protect America. TV network news programs excuse it day after day, year after year, as unintentional, constantly reminding that Americans do not target civilians - unless they happen to be in a target zone.

It's now eleven years since 9/11, but Americans are still proudly slaughtering in Afghanistan in calculated unawareness or without concern that the Muslims who highjacked airliners and flew them suicidally into the Trade Towers were from US ally Saudi Arabia ("They all look the same to me"). These heroic American young men, out to prove there manhood for family and country, were never made aware that they were sent to capture or kill the very same Arabs that Carter and Reagan's Presidential Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had invited into Persian speaking Afghanistan from all over the world and armed them to fight the Russians and the Kabul government. Worse, never made aware that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan to protect a neighboring ally's very popular (at that time) women-liberating socialist government in Kabul[6] from a CIA funded, armed and trained guerrilla army backed also by the CIA allied governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.[7] (The Soviet army came in a full half-year after CIA began arming, training and funding the fundamentalist hill tribe warlords attacks.)[7] Worse yet, still today, not been made aware that Brzezinski had purposely wanted to frighten the Russians to react, and bragged about it twenty years later to the French, proudly confessing having turned [poor] Afghanistan into a bloody pawn to win the Cold War.[7]

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Today Americans are suckered to take credit for girls being in school. Thirty-three years ago America was secretly funding ignorant terrorists who were executing government schoolteachers for teaching girls. In 1979, CIA was funding and arming warlord Gulbudin Hekmatyar, known for throwing acids into the faces of women not wearing the all covering veil.[8] In 2012, with few al Qaeda left to claim to be chasing, US media tells the US and allied European troops that they are in Afghanistan fighting for women's rights. 9/11 vengeance engulfs an ever widening net of designated enemies and suspected enemies as targets in a dozen Muslim countries and the is little time or patience for sorting out the distinction between hostile anti-imperialist radical Muslims and the merely devout praying for freedom from Western dominance and commercial culture.

"Marines on Taliban Killing Hunt! reads the caption title below the CNN video showing Darth Vader-like heavy caliber weapons in the hands of heroic U.S. Marines in armored cars entering a poor little Afghan town. Anchor Wolf Blitzer, in a voice filled with determination, describes how Marines have invaded a village long under Taliban 'control', (truth is, it is more correct to say 'under Taliban government provincial administration' as is most of the countryside). An audacious caption on the screen below the video reads, "Marines on Taliban Killing Hunt!"[9] A US lieutenant interviewed by another network at his outpost confidently reports killing thirty yesterday and twenty the day before, "They keep coming." Afghan children perish as well as previous OEN articles have pointed out: $2,000 for a dead Afghan Child, $100,000 for Any American Who Died Killing it.[10] Eight years of children starving and freezing to death in Kabul.[11] Shooting Handcuffed Children Aged 12 to 18.[12] All this inhuman carelessness in spite of the apprehension of vengeance some commanding generals must be fearing since 9/11, generals, who, during military adventures in Asia and Latin America, might have thought it comical to feel concern that people in poor nations could ever attack the US homeland in return.

US and European soldiers and airmen don't know who Taliban are. They are bad guys, and that's enough. That's what Wolf Blitzer seeks to prove, and the impression Judy Woodruff and Charlie Rose seek to leave audiences with. And Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and Charlie Rose are probably not worried about vengeance or a even a Nuremberg Principles trial, though it did happen to a few Nazi media personalities. There a is many decades long list of media criminals against peace, probably more guilty than the Pentagon and CIA who they appear as spokespersons for. US media corporations suffer no vengeance from a deceived world, from families of the millions murdered in their their own country's cities, towns and countryside, often as not, in their homes.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of (more...)